Dr. Lilith Fleischer - Lily, please - is a gifted therapist, a licensed psychiatrist, an exceptional hypnotherapist, and a mildly dangerous solipsist. She has concluded, after careful consideration, that she is the only person who is actually in there. Everyone else runs on chemistry. Fortunately for everyone else, chemistry is her whole job.
Her new patient is a 24-year-old game store clerk with six weeks of flat nothing, a single-car accident she is very done talking about. The chart says depression. The chart is a liar, but then again, so is she, and so are you.
SOLIPCYST is a puzzle visual novel inspired by Phoenix Wright, Return of the Obra Dinn, and grade school polymino puzzles: one patient, eight weeks, one hour at a time. Peel apart everything she tells you in good confidence to dig for clues. Pack her mind like a suitcase. Medicate, manipulate, stabilize, groom - anything necessary to heal the patient. Among other things.
A brain is a board: Therapy is polymino packing with a license.
A diagnostic interrogation: claims, evidence, challenges, and a woman who fights the label with everything except the truth.
The classic blunder: A visual novel that responds to your actions.
Eight endings, with variation. Designed to be replayed.
Average playthrough will discover around 12,000 words of Visual Novel, and hundreds more trying to pry apart all her testimony!
Content warnings: therapeutic abuse from the therapist's POV, grooming/manipulation of an adult patient, gaslighting, bipolar disorder, mania, depression, medical coercion, grief and parental death, a serious car accident (recounted and depicted), sexual themes. All characters are adults. The game does not endorse what it lets you do. Obviously.
Made for the Toxic Yuri VN Jam II.
Future case files to come, probably.
Credits below the read more.
CREDITS
Team
BSTDev - code, UI, design, script, music (that's me!)
Roxy Pop - portrait art; music & SFX consultation (@lonestareq.bsky.social)
Special thanks: Moon, Pallas, Quinn, and Eight - script feedback, plot workshopping, UI feedback, and moral support.
Third-party materials
Therapy office photograph via Unsplash
SFX/instrument samples adapted from the Phoenix Wright: Trials and Tribulations soundfont and the Mother 3 soundfont, both under CC BY 3.0
Guitar chord sounds from the YouTube channel JP SFX (released free to use)
It turns out that you can become the person you’ve always envisioned but you’ll still have the person you were before inside of you and you have to treat them with as much forgiveness and love as possible
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